Survival Fusion 2.0 - MPGotW 04/10/09

[Ant]

Maybe if you're attacking them from preferred terrain, with a unit that doesn't have the appropriate damage type, but no.

For one thing, since you cannot get a ghost as a leader, you would be taking some risk leaving an unfused leader alone when you go to finish others off, or equally spreading the fusion. (more than 2 super units still alive at the end)

Secondly, you're really exaggerating some of the units resistances. silver mage isn't going to do so well vs melee or a ranged impact/pierce attacker/defender. The lich is only really superior vs cold or pierce, fire attacks (e.g orcish slurbow, mage, etc.) will easily decimate it depending on hp of units in question, and blade resist is very minimal.

In fact undead are probably at the greatest disadvantage because the other factions can pump their units with plenty of hp through high hp units e.g wose, clasher/burner, guardsman, troll, HI/resilient units, which the undead lack, and when you go to face the other super unit with so little HP, it's going to need a fair bit of assistance to win from there.

I think the most important property for the superunit for a successful endgame in fusion is movement points. With high movements you can decide the time and place of your attack instead of the enemy. Assuring
* favorable terrain
* time of day
* and your strongest attack
for your unit. In the case of a stalemate at least you can assure the dominance of the middle region with high movements, for an economic endgame. The silvermage and the sylph excel in this category, above all others.

The second important property for your superunit is that it has to have at least one magic attack. Most of the endgame fighting is in the middle terrain with lots of forest, hills, and mountains or in the caslte where almost every unit has at least 60% defences. The sylph is excelling here with melee and ranged magic attacks, which makes it a good unit for defensive play, since the enemy superunit always risks to die as well in an attack.

And because of the dominance of magic attacks in fusion, the third important property is good resistances for your unit against fire, cold, and arcane since they are the most common magic attacks. The silvermage is here the best unit, since it has the best resistances of all magic attack units.

In reply to you, i think you are right with your assessment that undead are not that strong. Especially the lich has its obvious weaknesses. But the ghost has so good resistances, makes for an really easy early and midgame (earning you lots of money), and can only be easily countered by an magic arcane attack, that you can live with the lower health of your superunit compared to the other factions.

Further i am not sure if it is the best idea to play only with a fused up leader. It is very easy to protect your leader from not skirmishing units by blocking chock points, and a fighting leader is not able to recruit easily, ruling all economic endgames out.

In the end I wanted to add a small economic analysis of the game.
With normal starting money you can earn in the first 32 rounds 580 gold. I consider getting actually 515 gold pretty good. What kind of upgrades do you get from this considering undead and elves.

For 515 Gold you can fuse:
Amount of Units HP Extr.Att-Strk Moves
----------------------------------------------------
18 * Scouts 288 54-18 36 (42 considering quick units)
17 * Wose 442 51-17 0
22 * Bats 176 66-22 44
20 * Skeletons 340 60-20 0
(Statistical averages)

Who wins the fight, the very healthy slow Wose-fused-up elvish hero, or the low health, fast bat-fused-up ghost? My money is on the ghost.

Edit: Corrected the moves calculation for skeletons, thx mabuse.

[Mabuse]

skeletons cannot be quick
(just as a side note)

[Euthanatos93]

I'm with Ant on this one. Silver Mage's are an almost sure bet. Especially is you fuse into a leader because of their teleporting ability. Resistances, magic attack, etc. seal the deal. Only dwarves and ghosts are resistant to impact, neither are weak to fire and both lack magic attacks. The only thing that throws a wrench in the showdown is the FFA PvP dynamics which does not speak of balance factions in and of themselves.

[i_like_cheese]

When i try to fuse the game crashes. Please help me. I used default era and EOM.

[Ant]

Hi OOXX, and all the others.

I took your update of Survival Fusion to 1.8 you provided here and applied some small changes to it. Blueblaze the creator of Survival Fusion stated here that he is fine with modifications of his work.

The changes from standard Survival Fusions are:

* Leader can not be fused away. (A lot of players new to the map fuse away their leader by putting him on beacon 2 to be sacrificed, and are then unable to hire more units)
* Empty fusing is not possible. (There has to be a unit on both beacons. The game ending punishment for accidentally forgetting both units is removed)
* Labels informing the players about the units arriving for every enemy wave. (Before there was only a label for the very first wave)
* The Fusion process is derandomized. (In the standard map every fusion results in random(0..2) extra strikes and random(0..6) extra damage, this is replaced by 1 extra attack and 3 extra damage respectively. This has the same expected mean value as the random process, but removes the extremes, like fusing up a thunderer and getting no extra ranged strikes from several fusions)
* The Fusion process is better documented in the game-objectives, so that new players are better able to judge which units to fuse.